How full was the card and how often is the card reformatted?
This^^
I was just given a HD dash cam and the manual actually states to reformat the microSD card once a week for improved lifespan of the card. Does anyone actually practice this? Is this true?
I know that I re-format the SD card on my Mixpre-6 before every show but rarely do on my M10.
I'll be doing this with my cards every show now. ?
Doing it every show is probably overkill, but better than not doing it often enough. With a fresh format, there's less searching around for free sectors to write to since, with a fresh format, all of the sectors are free so they get filled up sequentially. At least that's how it's been explained to me in the past.
So a couple of factors to remember is that the the fuller the card, the fewer free sectors there are. Then lets say you delete a show from among a group of shows on a card. What happens then is that the free sectors can be scattered all over the card, so your recorder has to search around for free sectors to write data onto. If data can't be written quickly enough, the recorder has buffer memory that retains the information and writes it when the new sectors are found. But if the buffer fills up, then the result is drop outs. A similar thing happens when the card is too slow and can't keep up with the write speed needed for data to be written fast enough, which can happen like maybe if you're recording eight channels at 24/96. In that case, frequent formats can help as well as quicker cards.